An increase in female managers helped shrink the average gender pay gap to 21.7% this year, down from 22.8%, according to the WGEA's latest gender equality scorecard.
The Australian Public Service Commission is seeking feedback within four weeks on a draft "culturally and linguistically diverse" employment strategy for the APS that identifies almost 60 proposed actions for HR workers, diversity and inclusion teams, managers and senior leadership.
University research commissioned by the FWC has identified 29 "large, highly feminised" and probably undervalued occupations covered by 13 modern awards that it might spotlight in the current annual wage review, in response to the Secure Jobs' imperative to address unequal remuneration and gender undervaluation in minimum rates of pay.
Employment rights legal centre JobWatch says a client survey suggests most employers are failing to take internal complaints of workplace sexual harassment and discrimination seriously or to adequately protect employees, prompting recommendations to expand positive duty and vicarious liability provisions, and actively monitor compliance.
Queensland Council of Unions secretary Jacqueline King says Workplace Relations Minister Tony Burke is "receptive" to calls for new gender equity laws replicating the State's legislation that has "made more of a difference" in its first year than in the previous two decades under the Queensland IRC's equal remuneration principle.
Maurice Blackburn's head of employment and industrial law, Josh Bornstein, says damages for discrimination and harassment "remain persistently low" but he expects an upwards trajectory as their impact has been "laid bare" and expectations are now clearer.
The Nobel Prize for economic sciences has been awarded to a Harvard professor who has a penchant for historical detective work, digging into gender differences in labour markets that stretch back to the eighteenth century.
The NTEU is calling for urgent change, after its latest survey found that "s-xual harassment, s-xism, and gender-based bias in tertiary education workplaces continues to be largely ignored and as a result remains firmly entrenched in our universities".
In what is believed to be the first workplace breastfeeding discrimination ruling, a tribunal has found that a KFC franchisee indirectly discriminated against a worker when it told her to express milk in a tent, within a storeroom with no door.
Lawyers from the Redfern Legal Centre and Human Rights Law Centre are looking for s-xual harassment lawyers and industrial officers to complete surveys on the use of non-disclosure agreements in settling s-xual harassment claims, as part of a Sydney University program.
